“Right!” said Mr Fanshawe. “Be sure and call me at eight.”
CHAPTER XIX
SHAN
The Castle Knock beagles were a mixed pack of tall hare-hounds and tiny rabbit-beagles. Nearly every cottager boarded a dog; Mr French (a cousin of Mr O’Farrell, the Master of the Hounds) supplied most of the money requisite, and Shan Finucane was the huntsman.
Shan had been after hares for thirty years or so. He was a cadaverous-looking person with solid leather lungs, a face the colour of mahogany (almost), an eye like a gimlet, and an old green coat with three brass buttons on it. A battered old hunting horn, and a whip with a leaden ball on the top of it completed Shan’s rig-out.
Shan was great in the field, absolute master of all he surveyed; to see him, with the cry of the dogs answering his cry of “Forrard, forrard,” to see him with the tails of his old tattered coat flying in the air as he took bank and bramble hedge, mud-spattered, hallooing, exultant and glorious, was to see a sight you were not likely to forget in a hurry.
Though the beagles were good sport, and their runs sometimes attended by the “quality,” a section of the sporting community of Castle Knock turned up its nose at them.
Billy the Buck, for instance, would, so he declared, have sooner been found dead in a ditch than “runnin’ afther them baygles.” The little short runs that a hare afforded were no use to Billy: great stretches of country were the desire of his soul; besides, he was at mortal enmity with Shan.
Mr Mahony, the sweep, was also an anti-beagleite. His donkey-cart was never seen at a meet of “thim tarriers,” as he called them. The fact of the matter being that Mr Mahony hated to be outshone. He was the sporting oracle of the village. Two years ago he had backed “Ballybrack” at the Tullagh races. No one else had spotted the horse as a winner; it had started at thirty to one, and Mr Mahony had scooped thirty pounds, and been wheeled home under a pig-net in a wheel-barrow. Though he had backed several losers since then, his word was still law on all matters concerning sport, and the airs put on by Shan when he was hunting with his “tarriers” vexed the soul of Mr Mahony.
At nine o’clock of this bright, grey winter’s morning, coming along the broad high-road from Kilgobbin through air delicious with the scent of turf smoke from the cottages and the smell of the good brown earth, you might have seen Shan Finucane in all his glory, half a dozen couples of dogs at his heels, and his old whip under his arm.